Call it the prequel to the aid shake-up: Recent data shows that in the United Kingdom, INGOs were already seeing their income fall before the latest round of cuts. Here’s what the numbers say.
Also in today’s edition: Wasted health aid, Berlin’s €1 billion pledge, and the Accra Reset in action
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By the numbers
The fall of the U.S. Agency for International Development shook the world of aid — but even before its closure, organizations in the United Kingdom were feeling a squeeze.
Our latest analysis dove into the annual fiscal reports of the country’s 30 largest development charities. We looked at the most recent year for which they had filed financial information, and compared that to the year before. We found their incomes dropped by 3.4% in the most recent year, compared to the year before.
A few organizations in particular saw the steepest drops: Relief International UK, for example, reported a 70% decline in funding; Save the Children International, for another, had the biggest loss in cash terms: In a single year, the agency’s budget went down £189.5 million — from £1.4 billion in 2022 to £1.25 billion in 2023.
Despite the losses, Save the Children still topped the list of the largest U.K. organizations. The British Council followed with a revenue of £989.3 million, and Oxfam Great Britain came third, with £368 million.
Read: The largest UK development charities — and where they get their income (Pro)
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Funding activity
We publish tenders, grants, and other funding announcements on our Funding Platform. Here are some of those viewed the most in the past 10 days.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has approved a €22.5 million ($26.2 million) loan to boost access to finance for businesses in Moldova.
Islamic Relief USA has released $25 million in funding to support the World Food Programme’s efforts to reduce global hunger, including rapidly scaling food assistance operations in Gaza following the ceasefire.
The Korea International Cooperation Agency has provided $9.3 million to promote health and nutrition, combat food insecurity, and foster inclusive development in Côte d’Ivoire.
The OPEC Fund for International Development has signed a $750,000 financial agreement to promote climate investment projects and boost sustainable development in Central America.
The World Bank is inviting consulting firms to organize and deliver road-show training sessions to promote IT careers among young people in Uzbekistan.
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Aid-ache
Sixty percent of foreign health aid to Africa was effectively wasted.
That’s according to Dr. Jean Kaseya, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, who spoke at Devex Impact House on the sidelines of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund annual meetings last week in Washington.
“Let me also shock you: We don’t need more than 40% of [the] money we were receiving before,” said Kaseya.
Former Ethiopian Health Minister Dr. Lia Tadesse Gebremedhin took Kaseya’s point a step further, adding that fragmentation, inefficiencies, and a lack of alignment with government priorities sometimes led those waste levels to be closer to 80%.
Because of that, both experts said that what’s needed now is not more aid, but more efficient spending — along with an added emphasis on national health plans and public health systems. Such perspectives fit squarely within the Accra Reset — Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama’s push to turn disruption into opportunity, and to build a path toward health sovereignty.
Read: 60% of foreign health aid was effectively wasted, says Africa CDC chief
ICYMI: The ‘Accra Reset’ — time’s up for the legacy aid system
The cost of retreat
But for many organizations — and for many communities — the exact opposite is true.
Drops in foreign aid have led the World Food Programme’s budget to fall by 40% this year. In Afghanistan, those cuts have forced the organization to shutter nearly 300 nutrition sites — and to cut assistance across entire districts of the country.
“A woman called our hotline, telling us she could no longer see any way forward but to take her own life. Hunger was decimating her family,” John Aylieff, WFP’s Afghanistan country director, tells my colleague Ayenat Mersie. “Her husband was becoming more abusive as the family situation grew more desperate … And tragically and heartbreakingly, they’d sold their 12-year-old daughter into marriage with a 40-year-old man from the community who was known to have a drug addiction.”
Afghanistan is far from alone. Around the world, aid cuts have decimated humanitarian responses, with WFP warning that funding shortfalls could move 13.7 million people into the emergency level of hunger, the fourth of five steps on the United Nations’ scale for measuring food insecurity.
“In the last few months, with WFP, we’ve been turning away 9 out of 10 of the acutely hungry in the country,” Aylieff says.
Read: ‘We’re turning away 9 out of 10 hungry people’ — the cost of shrinking aid
A Berlin billion in changing world
Both perspectives — the push for new ways of delivering aid and the longing for more traditional approaches — were on full display at the World Health Summit, which brought 4,000 people to Berlin last week.
Germany, for one, committed €1 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria over the next three years. That pledge was €300 million less than what the country committed in 2022, Andrew Green reports for Devex from Berlin — but given the drops in aid across the globe, the news was met mostly with sighs of relief.
The conference, however, was largely centered around aid’s transition — with many, including Kaseya, pushing for a wider adoption of the principles outlined in the Accra Reset. Throughout the week, government, industry, and U.N. leaders attempted to describe the funding crisis as an opportunity, Andrew writes, with call after call to shift how health systems are reimagined.
“This is a great forum for advancing the Accra Reset agenda, debating it, finding solutions, and recruiting enthusiastic individuals to the cause,” says Lee Abdelfadil, a member of the technical subcommittee that is coordinating the Accra Reset. “We need to think it through and all be comfortable with where we are going together.”
Read: Germany commits €1B to Global Fund as aid cuts shape World Health Summit
Dig deeper: The World Health Summit focuses on opportunity amid a funding crisis
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About the author
Elissa Miolene
Elissa Miolene reports on USAID and the U.S. government at Devex. She previously covered education at The San Jose Mercury News, and has written for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washingtonian magazine, among others. Before shifting to journalism, Elissa led communications for humanitarian agencies in the United States, East Africa, and South Asia.
